Toleration
Posted by David Corfield
One of the goals of our activity in this joint blog is to further the ends of mathematics and physics through our public conversations. Likewise for philosophy, if not directly through the refinement of -categorical thinking, then indirectly by observation of what it is to partake in an enterprise such as the furthering of mathematics or physics by -categorical means. Naturally, in terms of helping ourselves achieve those ends, we have to consider the question of what we are prepared to tolerate, both in terms of the content and the spirit of any contributions.
I’ve just purchased the second volume of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Selected Writings (CUP 2006), and find he has interesting things to say on toleration within the conversations of a local community, such as ours:
Toleration then, so I have argued, is not in itself a virtue and too inclusive a toleration is a vice. Toleration is an exercise of virtue just in so far as it serves the purposes of a certain kind of rational enquiry and discussion, in which the expression of conflicting points of view enables us through constructive conflict to achieve certain individual and communal goods. And intolerance is also an exercise of virtue when and in so far as it enables us to achieve those same goods. (Ethics and Politics, CUP 2006: 223)
Characteristically, MacIntyre’s argument is presented in terms of virtues, and to note one we all perhaps fall short on:
One mark of the possession of those virtues [of conversational and argumentative accountability] is that of taking pleasure in having been shown to be mistaken, something notoriously difficult to achieve. Another closely related mark is that of being both able to recognize and willing to admit that one has shown to be mistaken. (p.222)
While we are hardly putting our necks on the line, there is a political dimension to the search for new fora for discussion, political in the sense of taking a view on the proper running of the polis, a community of enquirers in our case. The café of our title hints at the coffee house, a discussion forum new to Europe in the seventeenth century. Now, MacIntyre sees no possibility of worthwhile dialogue at the level of the nation state, where the diversity of opinion will be such that any control over debate will come from its framing by powerful institutions (business, political parties, the media). On the other hand, debate furthering the ends of a local community is possible. Having argued for the exclusion of those engaging in personal attacks, and, on intellectual grounds, of phlogiston supporters from scientific societies, and of holocaust deniers from political discussion, not as a state-imposed exclusion, but as performed by local communities, he continues:
But such intolerance has perhaps to extend somewhat further than I have so far suggested. The rationality of local communities, when it exists, is always an achievement, the outcome of a history in which a variety of difficulties and obstacles has had to be overcome. And rationality in such communities is always threatened by the seductive and coercive forces that are so powerful in the wider arenas of the civil society of advanced modernity. The rational making of decisions in everyday life has to be undertaken for the most part in milieus in which individuals and groups are exposed by the technologies of the mass media to too much information of too many different types of doubtful provenance, often misleadingly abbreviated, and designed in any case to arouse short-term interest or excitement that can easily be displaced by the next targeted stimulus. It is a commonplace that the use of slogans, the shortening of the public’s attention span, and the manipulation of feelings are now carried through in the media, in political debate, and in advertising with extraordinary professional expertise. So a set of further problems has been created. The rhetorical modes of rational enquiry and discussion are deeply incompatible with the rhetorical modes of the dominant political and commercial culture. And we cannot confront this incompatibility and the conflicts that it generates, and the goods that it threatens, without rethinking even further some well-established notions of freedom of expression and of toleration. But about how to do this constructively in defence of the rational politics of local community no one has yet known what to say. Nor do I. (p. 223)
We are, of course, far less afflicted by such intrusions, and we only meet in this virtual café, and so do not have to participate in other forms of communal activity with those not tolerated, but perhaps we should reflect on what forms of toleration interfere with the achievement of our ends.
Re: Toleration
I wonder what MacIntyre would make of this Haaretz article:-
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=538996
Hopefully he wouldn’t exclude the Yad Vashem spokeswoman.
“A Yad Vashem spokeswoman said there is no proof the Nazis made soap from human bodies during the Holocaust.”
“In 1990 samples from several soaps claimed to have been made from Jews were sent for DNA testing at Tel Aviv University. Likewise, those tests determined the soaps did not contain human fats.”